Fortune 500 Company Imagines Unique
Trade Show Experience: Digital Mettle
Delivers It.
Company’s marketing multimedia team storyboarded the required
application and selected the specialized hardware but discovered their
internal development team could not meet the tight 4-month timeline. By
partnering with Digital Mettle, they met the requirement and now own a
solution that their internal development team can enhance and maintain.
Goals
Approach
Technology
Results
o
Create a next-gen marketing automation platform using computer vision tech
o
Turn over all IP and related code to internal team to manage and enhance
o
Deliver code that aligns with internal client standards and practices
o
Conduct interviews with dev team to align with current development parameters
o
Create, deliver, and support custom software that meets all goals
o
Create specification document based on current technology investments
o
Windows PCs and Servers
o
Specialized hardware SDK to handle many users on a single device
o
o
Desktop application written in C# .NET
Computer vision to enable interactivity between digital and real-word objects
o
4 month deadline met in 3 months, serving Marketing team at critical tradeshow
o
Customer now has a proprietary marketing automation system that they own
and are considering marketing directly
o
o
Internal development team stayed on roadmap
Further phases extended the solutions to multiplatform tablets
Challenge
The Digital Mettle team has worked with this client to produce custom tradeshow and Executive Briefing Center
experiences for more than a decade. For their 2013 refresh, the client wanted to go in a drastic new direction. The
customer had already selected unique hardware with built-in computer vision and had a goal of interactivity between
digital and real-word objects. They needed Digital Mettle to make it happen quickly.
custom software development
www.digitalmettle.com | 919.877.7977 | [email protected]
Initial Challenges
The customer’s team responsible for maintaining their
library of multimedia was tasked with inventing a new
way of presenting for an upcoming trade show. Digital
Mettle had worked with this team many times before, but
new corporate policy required the team to work with
internal IT developers to create any new systems they
designed. Due to resource constraints, they could not
deliver the system in time and the media team was given
special permission to continue to work with their partner
of choice. Unfortunately, the delays in the internal process
meant the system was behind schedule before it was ever
started.
The Customer’s Vision
scenario of placing object upon it and having the digital
display react in a custom fashion.
To control the specialized hardware required quickly
learning the accompanying software development kit.
Important questions needed to be answered like the
capability and speed of the processing and of the vision
object recognition.
Digital Mettle quickly acquired duplicate hardware and
undertook a few weeks of rapid R&D work to make sure
they could get the most out of what the hardware
provided.
Iterating with a global team
The customer’s multimedia team was willing to provide
assistance in UI and UX development. They were not
familiar with the technologies required by the hardware
they had selected. Digital Mettle helped the internal team
select and train on designer quality tools for the .NET
platform so they could contribute directly to the solution
in progress.
The two teams posted daily progress videos to each other
so they could each see how the other’s work effected
important UX factors like interface responsiveness.
Media Management
With any new presentation system, especially one with
unique needs like associating digital assets to real-world
objects, media management becomes a key concern. As
part of the solution, Digital Mettle delivered new tools for
the internal team to use to organize their files and add
the new metadata the system would need.
A Solution Becomes a Product
Specialized Hardware
The customer’s unique user experience was driven from
their access to some very specialized hardware: a
horizontally mounted PC with a 40” screen with built in
computer vision – a PC “table”. The table enabled the
custom software development
The executive team for the company was so impressed
with the results of the effort that they are considering
implemented it not as a customer engagement tool, but
as a new product to sell to their customers.
The following year the solution was re-developed to be
compatible on a wider range of hardware including
Windows, Android, and iOS tablets. The solution has
been used and improved every year since it was created
and Digital Mettle facilitated the handoff to internal IT for
ongoing maintenance.
www.digitalmettle.com | 919.877.7977 | [email protected]